Law Students Suck

Back when Seth and I entered law school (which wasn’t too long ago), there weren’t a lot of outlets to discuss our prospects, the law school atmosphere, rankings, etc. I recall that, at the time, we were relegated to the relatively benign and largely useless Princeton Review message boards.

Since then, however, a message board entitled AutoAdmit has sprung up on the web; it’s a heavily trafficked board where law students and prospective law students discuss, well, law schools. In fact, when my wife applied to law school two years ago, she followed the AutoAdmit threads semi-religiously, spending several hours a week checking in. I even visited the boards myself occasionally, just to keep up with rankings, what the folks in law school were discussing, etc. And while a lot of the conversation on AutoAdmit is fun, for gossip’s sake, it also gets pretty vile at times. I recall that there was a lot of outright racism, sexism, homophobia, and anti-Semitism, discussed with the sort of colorful language you’d expect from a backwoods Alabaman who’d never managed to complete the third grade. It was, at times, hard to fathom — not that there were people like this in the world, but that there were so many of them who attended law school.

At any rate, the vile nature of many of these posts has now entered the mainstream, after The Washington Post noticed it this week. The story discusses how one female law student at Yale believes that the discussion boards actually cost her a job offer, which is debatable (I’m not sure how many hiring partners troll the law school message boards), but what isn’t debatable is the level of hate that flows so freely on these boards. A cursory inspection reveals thread subjects such as: “I stick my huge Asian dick inside White Pussy at Georgetown Law,” “Dear Nigger Phelps, please die,” and as WaPo pointed out, a sexual joke about a female Holocaust victim.

And you know…so what? There are shitty people — even law students — that write shitty things. Even here at QuizLaw, most of our posts are in relatively bad taste, and yeah: Many of our entries discuss the more prurient legal-related shenanigans.

But these people are now posting photos of particular law students and speculating on whether or not they would, for instance, “hate fuck” a particular female law student. And they are having the sort of Hotties contest that would make our pal, David Lat, blush. And, I guess, it’s gotten to the point where some female law students can’t even bring themselves to class, for fear that everyone in the classroom is gossiping/ogling/hating her, which — yeah, that kind of sucks.

There’s obviously not a lot that can be done about it – the administrators of AutoAdmit don’t want to moderate the threads (and, arguably, it’s not their responsibility to do so), but I guess I just thought I’d bring the matter to our readers’ attention and point you to a more lucid discussion of the matter by one of the female students being targeted by the boards. You know, in celebration of Blog Against Sexism Day. We’re doing our part here at QuizLaw.

[My old buddy, Professor Hoffman, also has some thoughts on a different angle of this whole Xoxohth (as the discussion board remains known to many) thing here and here. — Seth]